Review: Wet Circuits’ Water Resistant Power Strip

When the folks at Wet Circuits contacted me about reviewing their water resistant power strips, I couldn’t refuse after seeing their demo videos – they were cute but powerful demonstrations. Their 4-outlet power strips can be practically submerged in water and still operate without electrocuting you in the process. Read on for the full review.

About
Wet Circuits’ flagship product is their water resistant power strip. They have conservatively labelled it ‘water resistant’, although it is arguably in a class above that. It can withstand accidental spills, rain and even temporary flooding.

It is kid-safe – objects or fingers stuck in the outlets will not harm the holder. It also has overheat protection and will  cut the power should the temperature get too high. This and the spark prevention cuts down on fires.

Tests
Before I go on, I strongly recommend that you don’t try this yourself. The point of these power strips  is not so that you can store them in your aquarium as a sideshow for your home, but so that they function in the event of a water accident. The videos are only to demonstrate how effective they are.

I pretty much repeated experiment 3 with an old gadget that I had lying around the house. I plugged it into one end of the strip and stuck the other end into the sink and started filling it with water. As expected, the power continued to flow to the gadget without a problem.

I then pulled the strip out of the water, and while still wet, re-plugged the gadget into the now wet outlet. Still no issues.  Here’s a video of that in action:

Wet Circuits has some other demo videos, which you can see on their website or their YouTube channel. Especially powerful was the demo of sticking a pair of tweezers into a wet outlet! Did we mention that you should not try that at home?!

One minor annoyance that I had was how hard it was to plug in/take out grounded plugs. This doubtlessly has to do with its water protection features, and I don’t recommend you try to ‘get around’ it by only inserting a plug in half-way.

What We’d Like to See
There are just a few things we would like to see in this product or perhaps their follow-ups:

• An on/off switch. It would be nice to instantly shut down those vampire power draws.
• A site wire fault indicator.
• A few more outlets. It only has 4.
• This is a real nice-to-have, but outlets that rotate for those power adapters that end up taking up more than one outlet’s worth of space. Or if not,  how about having every other outlet be positioned 90° relative to its neighbor.

Conclusion
From my own little tests, I’ve got to love this product. It makes you wonder why other larger companies haven’t invested in and produced and/or promoted products in this niche. It seems perfect for safety-conscious parents.

(Disclaimer: Gizmos for Geeks received a complimentary review copy of this product.)